Thursday, July 21, 2016

When the dust settles it will be interesting to look at what this year's Presidential campaign tells us about money in politics. I've been thinking for a while that Sanders' argument was self-refuting: he raised a ton of dough, and although he made it interesting he still lost. On the other hand, Trump seems to have raised only a fraction of what his opponents brought in, and it seems unlikely that he will be the sort of fundraising juggernaut that Mittens was.

I should also reference this useful thread as well. Real Estate developers always use as little of their own money as possible, and this, of course, turns the usual model of campaign fundraising on its head. What a developer essentially does is to assemble investors to acquire a mortgage on a piece of property. With that in hand the developer seeks out other investors to put something on the property-- in the case of, oh, say Gates Circle, maybe the YMCA, or maybe it's enough to just say the Y. "I'm self-funding" is a scam, and the fact that he hasn't been called out on this is rather shocking.

What Trump's done is to coerce investment in his Presidential development scheme, which I guess supports the argument of his being a canny businessman. By exploiting the party system, he doesn't need to spend much himself (what he has spent has largely been on his own properties: staying at his company's hotels, flying in his company's jets and helicopters, etc.), but the GOP must put up money for the campaign, as must any of the PACs and Super-PACs committed to a Republican White House bid. It's been amusing to watch them struggle to spend their money elsewhere, when they can bear to do even that much, but that's only a small gag compared to the con Trump's pulling off.